So how good can adults reasonably get? “It’s a complicated puzzle,” says Alexander Burgoyne, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech who has spent his career studying the acquisition of difficult skills. If you want to get good enough to perform Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 onstage at Carnegie Hall, it might be easier if you start during childhood, after which the window of extreme neuroplasticity for finger dexterity and auditory skill learning begins to close. There’s just so much for an adult brain to master: two hands, two musical clefs, emotion, phrasing, performance anxiety. Piano is a different beast from other pandemic hobbies - knitting, for example, or baking sourdough (difficult as mastering stitches and perfecting proofing may be). Bell credits playing the trumpet in high school, which gave him a leg up on reading music. “Dwight has progressed, I would say, faster than many,” Levioff says. And with work - he practices two and a half hours a day - he has gotten surprisingly good: He now sails through the left-handed pyrotechnics of Handel’s Sarabande and Variations, sounding like a moody harpsichordist in a vampire movie. Since June, he has been meeting virtually with Arielle Levioff, an instructor at the 92nd Street Y School of Music. When the pandemic began, Bell found himself with more time on his hands and began looking for a teacher who could give him lessons over Zoom. He eventually wanted to play it - a desire that only intensified after he heard Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha’s version on the radio. 331, 30 years ago in an episode of The Twilight Zone in which the dolls in a dollhouse come to life. Dwight Bell, 64, first heard Mozart’s Sonata in A-major, K.
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